Squatting With My Earth Sisters by Carson Wolfe

Editorial intern Jay Gootjes on today’s poem: In her poem, “Squatting with my Earth Sisters,” Carson Wolfe takes readers on a journey exploring womanhood and nature. Her beautiful language delves into the spidery, intricate path of Wolfe’s evolving environmental and spiritual bonds with nature and her fellow women. The poem expands its scope by incorporating whimsical, vulnerable images that probe the multi-faceted relationship between humans and earth.

Squatting with my earth sisters

Around a tree seedling, 
panties at ankles, we release 
our pelvic floors, harmonize 
to the sound of us earning 
degrees in sustainable 
permaculture. Thea reaches 
inside of herself, pulls out 
a silicone harvest. Sips it 
like cranberry echinacea.  
On my first day here, the girls
took me down to the river 
to bathe, where are your pubes? 
they’d asked, outraged 
by wax and deodorant. 
I look like them now,
my nipple piercing 
healed as I sit in lotus 
at the meditation circle, 
labia flowering on woven rugs. 
I am still growing
into the woman who can 
crawl on all fours 
and press my face 
into each salted sauna, 
to flick like a wing 
in a rusted birdbath. 
At dusk, the feral dogs
come sniffing. 

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Carson Wolfe (they/she) is a Mancunian poet and winner of New Writing North’s Debut Poetry Prize (2023). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming with Rattle, The Rumpus, The North, New Welsh Review, and Evergreen Review. They are an MFA student of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and currently serve as a teaching assistant on the online writing course Poems That Don’t Suck. Carson lives in Manchester with their wife and three daughters. You can find them at www.carsonwolfe.co.uk and on Instagram @vincentvanbutch

If you would like to show your appreciation for the writer’s work, you can send them a tip through paypal @carsoncrane91